A teacher in an inter-college has recently been awarded the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree for his thesis on Mayawati by the Gorakhpur-based Deen Dayal Upadhya University in the state.

Nagendra Kumar, who teaches political science at an inter-college in UP’s Deoria district, has been awarded PhD on the topic “Role of Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh politics”. Kumar undertook his research under the guidance of Dr Gopal Prasad. Kumar had to face a lot of difficulties in completing his research. “It was a new topic and not much material was available in the public domain at that time,” he said.

“It took me three and a half years to complete the 881-page research paper. I studied over a hundred books on Mayawati,” Kumar told Deccan Herald from Deoria over the phone. “The so far untouched aspects of Mayawati’s style of functioning and her politics have been included in the research paper,” he added.

On what prompted him to select such a topic for research, he said in 2007, when he had applied for PhD, everyone talked about Mayawati’s social engineering, which saw her party catapulting to power in the state with an absolute majority after a gap of 17 years.
Kumar said in the beginning Mayawati’s politics towards the upper castes was negative.
“She could capture power only after adopting a positive attitude towards the upper castes,” he asserted apparently referring to the “sarva samaj” (whole society) slogan coined by her party in the 2007 assembly elections.

Incidently Kumar, who also belongs to the Dalit community, tried to meet Mayawati three times but could not succeed. “I wrote to her three times expressing my desire to meet her to get more information about her but I failed,” he said. He, however, received cooperation of some senior BSP leaders.